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Climbing Media Recalled Due to Faulty Hashtags

BOULDER – “We never saw this coming,” a spokesperson for a climbing company that wished to remain anonymous noted, in a press conference today in Boulder, following her company’s recall of a huge collection of photos due to faulty hashtags. “I mean, we thought that people would interpret our message as, like, only half-serious. Like, ‘ok, spend some time exploring, but also spend some time caring about, you know, racism, the public land heist, elections, things like that’. But people didn’t get that message. They thought that what we meant- really – was that exploring was all you should ever do. So we’re forced to recall.”

This has become an industry trend, of late, as many companies are taking a moment to look back through their inventory of hashtags, to make sure the message they send is one they actually want to be affiliated with. Another climbing gear manufacturer (who also wished to remain anonymous) recently made a voluntary recall of all social media posts instructing users to do very little other than climb. According to the marketing director for the company, “the obvious problem here is that a surprisingly large number of people actually think there’s more to life than climbing… we were getting a lot of #liveloverepeat, #livestriveforsocialjusticerepeat, even #livejustdofreakinganythingtomaketheworldabetterplaceinsteadofthisridiculousupdownupdowndancewealldowhiletherestoftheworldstrugglesjustomakeendsmeetrepeat… That last one was actually fairly common,” he said, scratching his head as if he were having trouble understanding something.

According to Peter Peterson, a climber of eightyfive years, and a previous employee of a company that wished to remain anonymous, “it just feels like, you know, they’re trying to sell us on this idea that all that matters in life is climbing, or exploring, or some other catchy cliche easily hashtaggable phrase; when, really, life is about a lot more than that. Like, where’s #worktoconservetheplacesyouliketoclimbfirstclimbsecond, or #spendmoretimeandenergyfightinglandtransferlegislationthancomplainingaboutovercrowding. You know?”

Of course, it’s not just the big climbing companies feeding into this disturbing trend. Individual use and overuse of vacuous and banal hashtags has led to some serious problems as well. In one case, an instagram-climber from Boise, Idaho, spontaneously fell into a Grand Mal seizure following an overdose of #themonkeysaresending. Similar health problems have been noted in the winter time, when there is a startling abundance of #cumbre, and #vidapatagonia.

Some climbers are calling for a ban on hashtags all together, citing the reduction of the most important things into the world into a catchy one-to-three word cliche is the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it.

To learn more about the anti-hashtag movement, go to nomorehashtags.com. Or, follow along on instagram at #nomorehashtags.